Acoustic and perceptual assessment of speech using a voice-prosthesis with valvular and manual occlusion.

Acoustic and perceptual analyses for the accomplished user of a voice prosthesis were performed. The study was performed to discover whether the performance and intelligibility of speech improved with the use of the tracheal stomal (TS) valve as compared with speech achieved by occlusion of the stoma with the thumb. Our data suggest that the speech produced in the patient tested was less desirable with the use of a TS valve than when manual occlusion was used.

Effect of auditory prestimulation on naming in aphasia.

In five aphasic subjects, picture naming alone was compared with picture naming in the presence of four different auditory cues. Eighty words represented by pictures were associated with the following auditory cues: the first phoneme of the target word; an open-ended sentence designed to elicit the target word; three words, one of which was the target word; three words, all semantically related to the target word. Three conditions--the phonetic cue, the open-ended sentence, and the set of three words containing the target word--facilitated naming significantly. The condition making use of semantically related words resulted in a significant decrease in naming performance. Implications of these findings for theories of verbal recall, impairment of verbal recall in aphasia, and language therapy are discussed.